EU Online Copyright Bill

From William New for Intellectual Property Watch:

European publishers and copyright holders have a friend in European Information Society Commissioner Viviane Reding, which she reinforced last week in describing efforts to push through a new bill on digital publishing copyrights...

“Copyright is a cornerstone of the information and knowledge-based society,” Reding told the 6 December European Publishers’ Forum. “This is why I introduced in the new framework an appropriate balance between ownership and access.”

On a similar subject, in The Guardian poet Wendy Cope calls for people to respect poets' copyright.

A few years ago one of my step-sisters asked me about Jenny Joseph's poem Warning - the one that begins: "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple." My step-sister spends a lot of time in the USA and had heard about the Red Hat Society, a women's organisation inspired by Jenny's poem. As Warning is included in an anthology I edited, I offered to send her a copy. "No," she said. "Don't bother. I'll get it off the internet." That was when it dawned on me that nowadays, if you want a copy of a particular poem, you don't have to buy a book.